Léon Morin, prêtre
Jean-Pierre Melville (1961)
Adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville from Béatrix Beck’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel of 1952, Léon Morin, Priest is set in a small town in France during and shortly after the Occupation. The film is soon intriguing, thanks to its look and to its unexpectedness. The sparse, muted atmosphere of a town under martial law is convincingly realised and Melville supplies unusual insights into the community. He describes their sharply differing receptions of Italian and German occupying forces: the former are, for some of the locals, an enlivening presence; the latter a dismal turn for the worse. When a Jewish man, Edelman (Marco Béhar), decides to get out of town while he still can, he leaves his workplace silently, with the air of dignified desolation expected of a doomed Jew in a Nazi-era film drama. The viewer, like the story’s heroine and narrator Barny (Emmanuelle Riva), is astonished when Edelman returns to the office to say goodbye to her before he makes his escape. He has somewhat disguised his appearance but the main reason it takes Barny a few moments to recognise her old boss is his new animation – Edelman seems fortified, she says, by a ‘spirit of adventure’[1]. Melville takes his time in revealing that Barny has a young daughter, France (Marielle Gozzi), and is a widow. Like her late husband, Barny is a communist; she and two other women, in a similar position, decide to have their children christened. These belated baptisms are an expression not of faith but of tactical nous – a way, the women hope, of avoiding the suspicion of the Nazi occupiers. The culminating surprise in the first part of Léon Morin, Priest occurs when, a little while after the christenings, Barny returns to church to take confession and meets the film’s title character.
The non-believer Barny does this to play a joke on her confessor. Looking at the list of clergy, she rejects the senior priest as being less likely to see the humour of what she’s doing. She chooses Léon Morin because, in contrast to the church’s other junior clergyman, he has a peasant name. Her first words to Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) are ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. His prompt, equable reply is ‘Not exactly’. This starts a dialectic that continues outside the confessional on Barny’s regular visits to Morin’s lodgings. Not only is the priest convinced in his faith and that his mission is to enable others to find God; he also relishes tough questions and discussion. Quickly aware of Barny’s keen intelligence, he gets her to read and give her views on books, some of them abstruse, in his library of theology. It takes concentration on the part of the viewer (and reader of subtitles) to keep up with their sparring – an effort that connects with the sustained intellectual and emotional challenge that weighs, increasingly heavily, on Barny, until she gives in and converts – to be more precise, reverts – to Catholicism.
Barny takes a flighty featherbrained office colleague, whom she thinks could use Morin’s moral guidance, along to see him. It’s only when this young woman whispers to her how handsome Morin is that Barny, according to her voiceover narrative, realises that. At one level, this is hard to credit: we have the sense that the widowed Barny is sexually frustrated; since Morin is Jean-Paul Belmondo, how didn’t she notice his looks sooner? The credible answer is that Morin is a priest and therefore off limits: Barny’s blindness serves as an almost comical indication of the persistence of her Catholic upbringing during her Communist atheism. The scene in which the scales fall from Barny’s eyes is followed by a couple of short sequences featuring Morin and female characters other than Barny, including another of her work colleagues, Christine (Irène Tunc), a character whose political volatility supplies a startling illustration of the pressures of life under the Occupation. Barny’s temporary disappearance from the action is jarring at first: as well as being the central consciousness of the story, she’s been a constant presence on the screen up to this point. Once you think about it, you realise this is a further instance of Melville’s narrative originality. Her absence from scenes involving Morin and other women reflects Barny’s new view of the priest and awareness that he is beyond her control.
Once Barny acknowledges Morin as a sexual being, the priest’s physicality has a new and very strong impact – especially when Barny directly asks him if he would want to marry her if he wasn’t a priest. This is a rare instance of Morin showing anger, though he doesn’t verbalise it. He’s chopping wood for Barny at the time: on hearing her question, he almost violently sticks the axe into the block of wood and takes his leave. After this, he and Barny don’t see each other for a while. (In one of the few weak spots in his storytelling, Melville doesn’t make clear whether Barny continues to attend church during this time and, if so, whether she goes to services conducted by a priest other than Morin.) It’s typical of the film’s intelligence that it doesn’t reduce either of the principals’ religious faith to nothing more than a repression or sublimation of desire. Barny and Christine recognise that Morin is capable of occasional sexual provocation, as when he passes close by Barny in church so that his surplice brushes against her; but Melville stops well short of suggesting that Morin entered the priesthood in order to deny his carnal appetites. By the same token, Barny does have increasing physical feelings for him but she doesn’t return to the Catholic fold solely because she fancies her priest.
Emmanuelle Riva captures Barny’s complexity admirably. Riva speaks and emotes very naturally, and physicalises Barny’s uncertainty beautifully – for example, as she hesitates on the staircase outside Morin’s rooms. With Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role, there’s never any doubt that Morin is a man who, but for his vocation, would have physical relationships with women. The way Belmondo plays him, Morin accepts, without fuss, that he can’t have such feelings: he isn’t fighting to subdue them through an act of will. Belmondo makes Morin’s straightforwardness compelling – it’s the quality common to the young priest’s intellectual sharpness, his decisive walk and sometimes brusque gestures, his candid recollections of a rustic childhood. Barny infers from those memories that he had a harsh upbringing but Morin’s attitude to his past is cheerfully measured. When he’s finally posted to a more rural parish and leaves the town, he admits that he’ll feel deprived of intellectual challenge yet he relishes the prospect of missionary work in what has once more become, he says, pioneer territory for the Church. Morin’s unstressed physical authority, his power and economy of expression mesh with Belmondo’s. It’s an imaginative piece of casting and a superb piece of acting.
Léon Morin, Priest is two absorbing stories for the price of one – a fine dramatic portrait of small-town France during the Occupation, as well as an unusual and complex (two) character study. An episode that takes place in 1945, involving two American GIs (Cedric Grant and George Lambert), is a partial misfire – a rarity in this film – but still contains good things. The soldiers accompany Barny and France (now played by Patricia Gozzi) from the countryside where the girl has been staying out of harm’s way back to the town. On arrival there, one of the GIs makes a pass at Barny. It’s another example of Melville’s inventiveness that an Allied soldier is the film’s only sexual predator but the actor who plays him is too crude. The child France’s fear and puzzlement, however, compensate for that. In later scenes, France follows her mother’s example in her spirited questioning of Morin about religious conundrums. The priest is also a father figure to the child and shows enthusiasm for the role. When he carries France into Barny’s bedroom and puts the child to bed, you could almost hear a collective intake of breath from the NFT2 audience – a natural twenty-first century reaction. To Barny, this moment illustrates ‘the irony of God’ – Morin enters the room where she herself sleeps but attends to the child in the bed that mother and daughter share. A sequence in which Barny had a dream that Morin came to her bed and made love to her seems disappointingly conventional until this later scene retrospectively redeems it.
Henri Decaë’s black-and-white photography is richly expressive. Barny makes the journey upstairs to Morin’s lodgings on numerous occasions but Decaë’s lighting gives the repeated image of the stairway, with its bare walls and their peeling plaster, a remarkable tonal variety – occasionally a momentous quality. The exchanges in the confessional are visually ingenious too. Barny’s and Morin’s faces are photographed at different angles – sometimes juxtaposed so that the grille separating them virtually disappears. Barny’s first entry, through dark curtains, into the confessional conveys a sense of penetrating depth that instantly contradicts the conscious sarcasm of her enterprise.
Something I learned from the film. When Barny challenges the priest about Christ’s hopeless, anguished ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ on the cross, Morin explains that Jesus, as a good Jew, was quoting the Old Testament. Sure enough, the opening verse of Psalm 22 is:
‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’
Barny doesn’t press Morin as to why Jesus chose this particular verse – the fact that he’s quoting David hardly diminishes his desolation – but it’s good to know the source of the words. According to his Wikipedia entry, Jean-Pierre Melville described himself as ‘an extreme individualist’ and, in terms of politics, ‘a right-wing anarchist’. I don’t know whether either of his stars was religious at the time the picture was made. If none of the main contributors was a practising Catholic, Léon Morin, Priest is all the more impressive in the respect with which it treats Christian belief, as represented by the two main characters. Of all the films that I’ve seen for the first time during 2017, this one is the best so far.
21 August 2017
[1] Or words to that effect. The same will apply to other ‘quotes’ in this note. I may not have remembered the words exactly and the film isn’t available to watch on YouTube to check.
